You're actually on to a really important thing that IT depts misunderstand about Excel/VBA monstrosities.
They exist because they work. You want UX or business analysis? You literally just got that done for you for free if you run into a Excel/VBA application. The hardest part of dev is figuring out requirements, so stop looking at these as toys and start realizing that shadow IT exists because of a gap in development. Full stop. You can argue all day long that you're working your assess off, and you do great products, but the existence of these apps is empirical proof that IT has missed the boat on developing something of importance.
They exist because they work. You want UX or business analysis? You literally just got that done for you for free if you run into a Excel/VBA application. The hardest part of dev is figuring out requirements, so stop looking at these as toys and start realizing that shadow IT exists because of a gap in development. Full stop. You can argue all day long that you're working your assess off, and you do great products, but the existence of these apps is empirical proof that IT has missed the boat on developing something of importance.
Use that.